In 2018, failed Democrat Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams refused to concede a fair statewide defeat citing unfounded claims of voter suppression.
“I acknowledge that former of Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election,” Abrams said when she finally ended her first effort to take over the governor’s mansion. “But to watch an elected official, who claims to represent the people in the state, baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote has been truly appalling.”
“So let’s be clear,” she added, “this is not a speech of concession because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that.”
Abrams went on to start a national organization against “voter suppression” in 2019 and never conceded that she fairly lost the Georgia governor’s race. Weeks after the loss, Abrams went on MSNBC to complain about “long lines” and “under-resourced” polling stations that suppressed the vote.
“It was not a free and fair election,” Abrams said, carving out her legacy as the OG election denier. “It was not fair to the thousands who were forced to wait in long lines because they were in polling places that were under-resourced, or worse, they had no polling places to go to because more than 300 had been closed.”
If Abrams and her group, “Fair Fight,” actually cared about voter suppression, however, they would be filing lawsuits in Arizona.
Federalist Staff Writer Shawn Fleetwood has been chronicling the issues that plagued the November election run by Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who also happened to be at the top of the ballot this cycle as the Democrats’ candidate for governor. In Maricopa County, home to nearly 62 percent of the state population, hours-long lines and broken machines turned away many same-day voters, who typically favor Republicans.
“After its close and contentious 2020 election, Maricopa County officials refused to cooperate with an audit of the election by state senators and dismissed concerns about how it conducts elections,” Fleetwood reported. This year, it took poll workers nearly two weeks to finish counting ballots, with election workers reporting issues with the equipment. “Printers with misconfigured settings in at least 70 of Maricopa’s 223 voting locations printed ballots that were rejected by many of the center’s vote tabulator machines.”
According to the Arizona attorney general’s office nearly two weeks after Election Day, voters who were having issues at their original vote center were told at their second destination that the state system showed they had already cast ballots.
Hobbs ultimately won the governor’s contest over Republican Kari Lake, an ex-television anchor, by just more than 17,000 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast. The results were certified on Monday over Republican objections. Lake plans to file a lawsuit challenging the election on Friday.
“We’re ready to go with what we believe to be an exceptional lawsuit. And we believe we will be victorious in that lawsuit,” Lake told Steve Bannon on his “War Room” podcast. “We’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to. We will not stop fighting. Because the people of Arizona were disenfranchised.”
Despite her supposed quest to restore access to the ballot box, Abrams remains silent on the problems in Arizona.
Meanwhile in Georgia, where Abrams and the entire Democrat Party went all in last year against Republican reforms to the state’s elections system, calling it “Jim Crow on steroids,” this year’s midterms featured record-level early-voting turnout weeks before Election Day. According to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, Tuesday’s runoff broke more records for all-time turnout in the midterms, “with more votes cast than any other midterm,” totaling more than 3.5 million residents who cast a ballot. Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock carried the runoff race by nearly 3 points, earning his first full six-year term to the upper chamber, despite amplifying his party’s hysteria over statehouse Republicans’ 2021 election law that actually expanded early voting.
“What the state Legislature did yesterday is to try to arrest the voices and the votes of the people,” Warnock said in Atlanta last year. “The issue of voting rights is about the democracy itself.”
Despite the law’s passage, Warnock achieved six years in the Senate by an even wider margin than his first special-election runoff in January 2021. So much for all the GOP “voter suppression” in the Peach State. Will the Democrats who claim to care about voter suppression begin to turn their heads to Arizona? Will there be a reckoning over the party’s own hysteria concerning a law that did nothing to hinder their victories? Don’t count on it.
The party’s corporate allies in Georgia, including Major League Baseball and Coca-Cola, which participated in the Democrats’ efforts to kill the election-integrity bill, have so far refused to offer any moment of self-reflection. Warnock himself already told supporters in his victory speech that he won despite “voter suppression.”
